3 ms·

Getting a 403 forbidden link from source right now, did we trip the poor guy's ddos protection or is it just me?

Aachen 3y ago
Same here. A computer decides I'm not going to see this and that's that, the info on page is 403 forbidden and the word nginx. No recourse or way to let anyone know the thing is broken. If my IP address or language setting were Russian or something I'd at least be able to see a reason for it, but no, Germany and English. On an Android! I know, very dangerous. Can anyone post what this site is? So I can tell whether this #1 story is worth it trying a different ISP or user agent string or whatnot
- nkurz 3y ago
  It's the blog of a researcher at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He does research on the impact of social media on society. It's a Wordpress site, hosted by someone commercial. I know him, and I'm almost certain no blocking would be intentional. If you (or others) give me details about how your access is failing, I'll pass the info on to him so he can try to get it fixed. In the meantime, this archive page should work for you: https://web.archive.org/web/20231223131348/https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231223131348/https://ethanzuck...
  - Aachen 3y ago
    > you (or others) give me details about how your access is failing Well, I click the link and get the access denied page. Do you need an IP address (93.135.167.200), user agent string¹, timestamp, or what would help? Randomly noticed my accept-language header is super convoluted, mixing English-in-Germany, English, German in Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, Dutch, and finally USA English, with decreasing priority from undefined to 0.9 to 0.4 in decrements of 0.1. I guess it takes this from my OS settings? Though I haven't configured it explicitly like that, particularly the en-US I'd not use because of the inconsistent date format and unfamiliar units system. Maybe the server finds it weird that six different locales are supported? Thanks for responding and relaying! ¹ Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Pixel Build/QP1A.190711.019; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.132 Mobile Safari/537.36
    - nkurz 3y ago
      I'll pass it on. I'll note that when I tried to create an archive link with archive.ph, its crawler also reported that it failed with 403. The archive.org (unrelated organization) crawler worked as expected. Which makes me think it's probably not specific to your setup, but some sort of anti-DOS protection gone awry. The sudden HN load probably looked abnormal, and it erroneously started blocking legitimate requests from some parts of the internet.

Same here. A computer decides I'm not going to see this and that's that, the info on page is 403 forbidden and the word nginx. No recourse or way to let anyone know the thing is broken. If my IP address or language setting were Russian or something I'd at least be able to see a reason for it, but no, Germany and English. On an Android! I know, very dangerous. Can anyone post what this site is? So I can tell whether this #1 story is worth it trying a different ISP or user agent string or whatnot

nkurz 3y ago
It's the blog of a researcher at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He does research on the impact of social media on society. It's a Wordpress site, hosted by someone commercial. I know him, and I'm almost certain no blocking would be intentional. If you (or others) give me details about how your access is failing, I'll pass the info on to him so he can try to get it fixed. In the meantime, this archive page should work for you: https://web.archive.org/web/20231223131348/https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231223131348/https://ethanzuck...
- Aachen 3y ago
  > you (or others) give me details about how your access is failing Well, I click the link and get the access denied page. Do you need an IP address (93.135.167.200), user agent string¹, timestamp, or what would help? Randomly noticed my accept-language header is super convoluted, mixing English-in-Germany, English, German in Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, Dutch, and finally USA English, with decreasing priority from undefined to 0.9 to 0.4 in decrements of 0.1. I guess it takes this from my OS settings? Though I haven't configured it explicitly like that, particularly the en-US I'd not use because of the inconsistent date format and unfamiliar units system. Maybe the server finds it weird that six different locales are supported? Thanks for responding and relaying! ¹ Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Pixel Build/QP1A.190711.019; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.132 Mobile Safari/537.36
  - nkurz 3y ago
    I'll pass it on. I'll note that when I tried to create an archive link with archive.ph, its crawler also reported that it failed with 403. The archive.org (unrelated organization) crawler worked as expected. Which makes me think it's probably not specific to your setup, but some sort of anti-DOS protection gone awry. The sudden HN load probably looked abnormal, and it erroneously started blocking legitimate requests from some parts of the internet.